A drag issue : to bungee wings or not to bungee

[Tortuga68]

Why post a photo? Why no weights? Why SS BP? Why 3mm shorty? Why 94#? Why AL80s? Why not? Help me out here

 

[lamont]

There's a photo of my wing earlier in the thread. Yes it's a 94# wing. I dive with a SS backplate and AL80s and a 3mm shorty. No weights

Am I overweighted?

No, you are not overweighted.

Why do you need such an obscenely large wing though?

You can dive double-130s jacked up with nitrox and a pair of nitrox deco bottles with a 60# wing, so what problem does 94# of lift solve, other than insufficient fabric in your wing to snag on something and not enough taco around your tank?

 

[cool_hardware52]

That would all be very relevant if we were discussing the lift required; but it's got nothing to do with bungee vs non-bungee

No-one in this thread has said they need a 100# wing. And you can get 45# bungeed wings

There's a photo of my wing earlier in the thread. Yes it's a 94# wing. I dive with a SS backplate and AL80s and a 3mm shorty. No weights

Am I overweighted?

Over weighted? No

Way over winged? Ya, by about 77 lbs......

Tobin

 

[LiteHedded]

Why post a photo? Why no weights? Why SS BP? Why 3mm shorty? Why 94#? Why AL80s? Why not? Help me out here

why 94 pounds of lift with that configuration?

 

[LiteHedded]

nevermind. my head is going to asplode. I have to get out of here.

 

[lamont]

No hard feelings dude. I personally would like a smaller wing. The more my diving has progressed the more I realized that my wing is way to big. Believe it or not I have gone from the comfort harness thing to just a backplate and webbing. I plan on downsizing to a smaller wing with dual inflation. But to dissapoint you I plan on getting the oms tesseract which is bungee forward and will not push gas out of your BC like the old ones.

Again, though, what problem do I have in my non-bungee wings that you are solving with your bungees?

At some point you've got an appropriately sized wing, the fabric isn't an entaglement hazard of any kind, it doesn't taco, its easy to dump -- so why do you add bungees to it?

yeah, it isn't going to kill you or anything, but what's the point? is it just kind of a nike swoosh and brands you as a certain kind of techdiver (or *not* a certain other kind of techdiver)?

 

[lamont]

nevermind. my head is going to asplode. I have to get out of here.

+1

i have real work to do.

not sure why i poked my head into this thread to begin with... been having this discussion for longer than i've been diving...

 

[Tortuga68]

that is a path to bungee wings.

i've witnessed this kind of idiocy and it begins with bad buoyancy control, it leads to a 120# wing, when the diver realizes that they've got a ton of fabric flapping all over the place, they bungee the wing. this was in a tech instructor teaching PADI wreck penetration courses.

It may be A path - although I've never seen someone 'bungee' a wing myself, in my experience they either use a bungee wing or a non-bungee wing - but it is not the path that everyone who uses a bungeed wing has followed

that is not the only reason to bungee wing, but i used a complicated thought there with an "or else" clause -- attempting to twist my statement into one where *all* bungee wing users are using 120# wings to compensate for poor buoyancy control is a fallacy. i never stated that.

'complicated thought' nice snark

Since we agree that *all* bungee wing users are not using 120# wings (is there even such a thing?), why did you bring it up?

Your other irrelevant reason why that bungee-wing users don't know how to vent - I have three other non-bungee wings and seem to manage ok with them

 

[Garth]

no one's going to say that. think it through.
also, put a shirt on.

haha. thanks for the shirt comment. Me and my wife were in the caymans for that photo. What a beautiful place.

 

[danvolker]

That's just another straw man, with exaggeration to boot. The debate is bungee vs non-bungee, so how is the size of the wing or weighting relevant?

I remember back in around 1998, when we strarted seeing alot of "techdivers" using huge massive wings---some maybe well beyond 100 pounds of lift from the looks of them...there were trim issues with all this massive volume....I think OMS decided this was an opportunity to keep the big monster wing feeling, and gain an even cooler look with the bungee solution to make the wing appear smaller profile throughout the dive ( with the assumption that they could grow alot, if needed).

One of the big things Halcyon began in the late 90's, was talking about how you DID NOT want all this monstrously excessive lift..that it was really dangerous if you had a runaway inflator problem....a runaway inflator issue on a small wing can be managed and fixed without that much change in depth, but with the godzilla wings, this could be an elevator ride to the surface. Lung overexpansion, AGE, boat runs over your head... the uncontrollable ascent is bad. ...


And this brings me to one of my storys
BAck around 95 or so, George, Bill Mee, Nigel, and one English guy new to diving with us were doing the RB Johnson/Coryn Chris....This was in the deep air days. Bottom was around 275 or so....I was spearfishing, everyone else exploring. After 25 minutes, the designated time to group together and head for the surface, we would use a technique known as "Blow and Go". With everyone there, we all signalled ready, and we all FULLY INFLATED our large bladder , jacket style, double tank BCs...The idea was to remove each additional minute of huge deco penalty from the big depth over 100.
You would ROCKET to 100 feet, with this enormous floor of screaming bubbles chasing us from below, like a monster in a d movie. Your dump valve in the BC would litterally be SCREAMING like a huge horn, with the massive airflow coming out of it.....
So, on this dive in question, the new English guy happened to be right next to me as we were flying upward...at 100 feet you completely dump your BC, coming to an abrupt STOP in the water collum. I had done this over 30 or 40 times before, it was simple and effective. But this time, I could see the english guy having major trouble dumping...he went to upside down, and was swimming downward as hard as he possibly could...I saw this, and realized he was having a dangerous failure to dump--and needed more time to fix it....I grabbed him, and began trying to swim him down also, as did one other diver in our group.....I remember thinking -- " I am not swimming fast enough, this may not work.." maybe 2-seconds of this, maybe it was only one..it seemed like an instant....and all three of us were on the surface.

I had read about hypersaturation taking over a minute, so intellectually I believed I could fix this if I went instantly back down to 100 feet...All three of us looked at each other like the scene in Animal House when the horse dies from heart attack in the Dean's office, and Belushi and the others run out screaming....
I told the english guy to puncture the damn bc with his knife, and the 3 of us were back to 100 feet about 7 seconds later, to a shocked George, Bill and Nigel...
We did a little more extra time at 100 then usual, maybe 10 minutes, then went on to the 50 foot stop, then the 40, etc. Finished at 20 feet with pure O2 and out with about an hour of total deco.
No dcs, no expansion damage, no AGE, just lots of dumb luck ( and obviously none of us were asmatics or impaired in ventilation abilities) ...

The deal for this thread, is that a big honking BC that has way more lift than you need, can rocket you to the surface so fast you won't even know you are on the way to the surface , until you get there !!! And this IS a big deal. This could easily kill someone. So the idea that it was cool around 98 or so, for a BC company to create a marketing theme that "more lift is better", was really not a good thing, and hiding the huge wings by pulling them in with bungees was not exactly the solution we wanted.

We wanted "enough lift"....not alot more than enough....and with the end of blow and go, which fell out of favor soon after this incident, we were always "swimming" ourselves up from depth, never taking an elevator ride from the bc or wing.

Regards,
DanV